Food and travel TV series to be filmed through Sunday in Durango

Television crews will be filming a show this weekend at locations in Durango, including the railroad depot, Rochester Hotel and Leland House, El Moro Spirits and Tavern, Bookcase and Barber, and Honeyville.

The show, “Frontier Tastes and Tales,” follows Jimmy Lakey, an adventurer and food and travel expert, as he explores the historical and cultural sites, cuisines and beverages, interesting characters and hole-in-the-wall, colorful narratives of the North American frontier.

The director, Jim Bryan, said filming started in Wyoming and continued to northern Colorado. The crew spent Thursday night in Pagosa Springs before arriving in Durango on Friday afternoon. The film crew will be in Durango through Sunday before they move on to film in New Mexico and Texas over the next weeks.

“A show like this is all about these places giving us good stories, good beer and food, and then we turn around and give them good exposure when people see it on television,” Bryan said. “It’s kind of the same concept as food and travel shows like Anthony Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations,’ except it’s not focused on big cities. We want to keep it in the frontier theme, and look for the out-of-the-way towns.”

Bryan said Durango is the largest city besides Cheyenne where they have filmed so far. They chose Durango over a city like Boulder, for example, because it’s a place that has retained its Old West heritage and the little stories that haven’t been told nationally.

Bryan said that the show has a two-year syndication commitment. Filming is expected to continue into 2020 throughout the North American frontier, from Texas to Alaska, California to Ohio, and throughout the Rocky Mountains. He said that the Durango area is being considered by Television Syndicate Co. as a centralized location for a film studio. The proposed editing and production studio would consolidate other studios of the production company into a central location in the Four Corners or Durango area.

The first 13 episodes of the series being filmed right now are expected to be ready for editing by mid-March.